NASA’s Operation IceBridge has been studying how polar ice has evolved over the past eight years and conducted a set of 12-hour research flights over West Antarctica at the start of the melt season. Researchers have used the IceBridge data to observe that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be in a state of irreversible decline directly contributing to rising sea levels. NASA and University of California, Irvine (UCI) researchers have recently detected the speediest ongoing Western Antarctica glacial retreat rates ever observed. [23 photos total]

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A view of a massive rift in the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf on Nov. 10. Ice shelves are the floating parts of ice streams and glaciers, and they buttress the grounded ice behind them; when ice shelves collapse, the ice behind accelerates toward the ocean, where it then adds to sea level rise. The IceBridge scientists measured the Larsen C fracture to be about 70 miles long, more than 300 feet wide and about a third of a mile deep. It will produce an iceberg roughly the size of the state of Delaware.
(Maria-Jose Vinas/NASA via AFP/Getty Images)
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